Fields of Exile

by Nora Gold

  Oh, shit. Don’t let them start on Israel.

  A couple of hands wave in the air. Greg points to one on the right side of the room.

  “I’d say China,” says Mike.

  Judith is so relieved she wants to laugh. Greg asks Mike to elaborate. It turns out that Mike’s sister has lived in China for the past five years, so he knows what’s happening there. He talks volubly about the Chinese government’s stifling of political dissent, its control and censorship of the media, the multiple abuses of human and civil rights ever since Tiananmen Square, and how even today people are often arrested for no reason and held indefinitely without trial.

  Greg nods gravely throughout. He thanks Mike, and points to another student.

  “Palestine,” says Kerry.

  Judith has been thinking, Don’t say Israel, Don’t say Israel, so it takes her a second to grasp that Kerry has just said Israel. Meanwhile Kerry — whose squishy face looks like someone simultaneously pressed down on her scalp and up on her chin — has begun explaining her choice without any prompting from Greg.

  “Because Israel is the most oppressive country in the world today. Israel is just like South Africa used to be before the indigenous people took it back. The Jews stole the land of Palestine away from the Palestinian people, and under this illegal and immoral occupation, the Palestinians are treated like second-class citizens without any civil or human rights. This situation is perpetuated by the social, economic, and military policies of Zionist imperialism and colonialism, which are supported by the international Jewish lobby, which controls the media and the banks, and also by the American government, which itself is imperialist and colonialist. Together American and Zionist interests effectively oppress and subjugate the Palestinian people. Just like people of colour, who have been oppressed and exploited both in the United States and South Africa. So it’s no coincidence that, after the U.S., South Africa is Israel’s closest ally and trading partner.”

  Not true! thinks Judith, her heart pounding. She knows that nothing she just heard is true, but she can’t speak and she can’t formulate anything clearer than No! Not true! because she’s in shock. She was aware, of course, that there were people who believed this stuff, but she’s never before heard it said out loud in her presence. She feels like someone has kicked her in the stomach. Through a haze, she sees that Kerry has finished speaking and is proud of herself, and a number of other students are giving her a thumbs-up, including Tyler. Judith doesn’t know Kerry very well — she just lent her a pen once when Kerry’s pen started leaking — but she’s never struck Judith as particularly bright. Yet her little speech came out in perfect, pre-fab sentences, like something handed to her to memorize, a sort of catechism. As she stares at Kerry’s ugly, squishy face, Judith seems to have stopped breathing. The whole world seems to have stopped breathing. All she’s doing now is waiting. Waiting for Greg to speak. To say what needs to be said. The way he did a few weeks ago in class when Miguel admitted he is uncomfortable around gay people, and Greg responded by “putting Miguel’s feelings into social perspective.” He reminded them all how in this society we are taught to hate people who are gay, lesbian, bi, and trans, or at least to feel uncomfortable with them and experience them as “Other.” So Miguel’s reaction to GLBTs was not merely a personal, individual one, but a socially constructed response, which we must view critically, and challenge in ourselves and others whenever we encounter it.

  Judith waits, sure that Greg will do the same thing again now. He will put Kerry’s comments into social perspective. He will challenge her “facts” and assumptions, including the idea of a “Jewish lobby.” He’ll talk about the limitations of the anti-oppression paradigm, and how black/white analogies from the United States or South Africa are not accurate regarding the Middle East. She is sure Greg won’t let this pass. She looks at him expectantly, waiting for him to say what she is unable to, having become frozen and mute.

  But Greg doesn’t say a word. He just nods at Kerry as he nodded at Mike, and asks the class if there are any other places they’d like to mention. There’s silence. This can’t be happening, she thinks. He’s got to say something. The silence continues, so Greg calls on two students who previously had their hands up, but they both shake their heads: they, like Kerry, wanted to say Israel. Then, just as Greg looks like he’s about to start lecturing again, Genya raises her hand and says that she sees Afghanistan as an oppressive country because of its treatment — or, should she say, mistreatment — of women. “Even women with college degrees are no longer allowed to drive cars and can’t leave home unless accompanied by a male relative. Not to mention,” says Genya, “being covered from head to toe as if your body were a thing of filth that needed to be hidden.”

  Unexpectedly Greg smiles, and his eyes gleam. “Now, this is very interesting,” he says. “What do you all think about what Genya just said?”

  Judith is confused. She doesn’t understand why Greg is smiling. And she is still waiting for him to say something in response to Kerry. As if through a fog, she hears someone agreeing with Genya and then Greg saying, “Ah. But let’s think a little more about this.”

  Now Greg explains that the challenge in respectfully relating to other cultures is precisely that they often hold values that conflict with ours, even values we hold very dear, like women’s rights. “So we have to work very hard,” he says, “not to be ethnocentric. After all, if other cultures’ values didn’t conflict with ours, then it wouldn’t be challenging to work cross-culturally, or ‘across difference.’ This is exactly the nature of the challenge. So if this is their culture in Afghanistan, who are we to tell them that they are wrong in how they regard and treat their women? Where do we come off saying that they don’t meet the standards of our Western culture on this issue? Furthermore, we have to be very careful not to be influenced, or even manipulated, by all the post-9/11 hysteria in the United States, that in many obvious and subtle ways is fostering Islamophobia around the world. Which, of course, is just another form of racism and oppression.”

  Judith is having trouble breathing now. She can’t have understood this correctly. That Afghanistan is deserving of indulgence, tolerance, and cross-cultural respect for its diversity, even though it has virtually enslaved all of its women, but Israel is not. Israel is an evil empire, and Afghanistan is okay. I must have misunderstood, she thinks, as the room swims around her. This is Greg. This is Greg’s class, “Introduction to Social Justice.” A safe place to learn together — he told them on the first day of class — where all individuals and collectivities are respected, and no one gets trivialized or marginalized.

  Greg is still talking but she can’t hear him anymore. She is feeling herself disappear. She feels herself getting smaller and smaller, her insides leaking out of her like the ink from a broken pen, until there is nothing left in her. She is not real now, she’s just a shell. But no, there is one thing left inside her: a wind. A wind blowing around and around, forming itself into a tornado. Like the tornado in Munch’s painting. A tornado that is a scream. And in the middle of her scream, there is only one word.

  Israel.

  Eventually Greg’s class finishes, and there is a scraping of chairs as everyone gets up from their seats. All around Judith, people are talking. Everything seems to be perfectly normal. But she feels a wall between her and everyone else. She is walking out of class as she always does with Cindy, Pam, and Aliza, but she is not really there — she is buried deep inside, floating forward in a little bubble of her own. From safe in there, like inside a one-seat helicopter, she watches a cluster of admirers form around Kerry: Ranna, Althea, and Tyler, and then around Tyler a sub-cluster of his own: “the dipsticks,” Kiki and Lana, and Mike. Passing them in the hall, Judith avoids eye contact. With her own little gang she heads toward the cafeteria for lunch. Outside they walk four abreast, their heads lowered against the wind, like rams with their horns down ready to charge. When the sidewalk narrows and there’s insufficient room for all
four, Aliza, her arm linked through Judith’s, drops back, pulling Judith with her, behind Cindy and Pam. For a while they walk in silence. Judith’s throat, all the way to the top of it where the tongue starts, feels clogged with fear.

  “That fuckin’ bitch,” says Aliza. “Comparing Israel to South Africa.”

  Judith turns and peers at her. So it wasn’t just me. Aliza felt it, too. She and Aliza have never talked about being Jewish; they just wished each other Happy New Year once on Rosh Hashana, and when Aliza heard Judith had lived in Jerusalem she mentioned having a cousin on kibbutz. But Judith didn’t know if she cared about Israel. Now there’s a slight lightening of the choking pressure in her chest, and her throat loosens up enough to allow for speech.

  “We’re the worst country in the world, didn’t you know?” she says. “Worse even than Afghanistan.”

  “Sssh,” hisses Aliza. Judith follows her gaze: Kerry’s gang is passing them on the left, like a car in the fast lane. Tyler smiles blithely at Judith; she just stares at him. She and Aliza are silent until that gang has passed. But before they can speak again, they are already at the cafeteria entrance. Pam and Cindy are waiting there, Pam holds the door open for them, and they enter and get in line. It’s warm and cozy inside, and the sound of the bubbling vegetable soup is comforting. But Kerry and her friends, laughing and talking, are just two spaces ahead of them. Judith feels like she should go over to them and say something. But she can’t right now; she’s too raw. And also she is afraid of them. They hate Israel. Which means they hate everything she loves, and everything she is.

  Cindy, Pam, and Aliza have also spotted Kerry’s gang up ahead, and by tacit agreement, the four of them gaze up at the menu and talk only about the day’s specials. Cindy and Aliza joke around about the revolting-sounding casserole of the day. “Hallowe’en Hash” it’s called, because in three days it will be Hallowe’en. Right — Judith had forgotten about that. The pimply boy in the peaked white cap behind the counter enumerates for Cindy and Aliza the contents of Hallowe’en Hash: charred Cajun chicken, black licorice, black-eyed peas, butternut squash, orange sherbet, and cheddar cheese. A repulsive mélange of ingredients, all of them either black or orange. It is all Judith can do to keep from lurching to the bathroom and barfing all over the sink. So when it comes her turn to order, she asks only for a roll.

  “Nothing else?” asks the guy.

  “Only a roll,” she replies, feeling like Bontsha the Silent in the Yiddish story, who can’t think of anything better to ask for in the world than a roll. Then she sits silently without even touching it while Cindy, Pam, and Aliza eat their lunch, watching the clock so as not to be late for Suzy’s class. Cindy enthusiastically digs into her mess of Hallowe’en Hash.

  “It’s very good,” she says with her mouth full. “Not at all as gross as it sounded.”

  What Cindy is eating is the exact colour and consistency of vomit. Judith has to look away or she’ll puke. She remembers Sartre’s black-covered book, Nausea, that she read in high school. This isn’t a stomach upset I have, she thinks. This is existential nausea. I literally cannot stomach this world.

  Aliza, however, apparently can. Judith glares at her tray, piled so high it’s almost overflowing with food: macaroni, a tuna sandwich, french fries, a large diet Coke, coleslaw, a fruit cup, and a double honey cruller. Why is it pronounced “crueller”? she wonders. What is it crueller than? Is it cruel at all? And how can Aliza eat at a time like this? Then she answers herself: Because Aliza is a galut Jew. It’s true she reacted sort of like I did to what happened just now. But not exactly. Aliza has lived here all her life and at some level she’s used to this kind of thing. But I’m not. I am not a galut girl.

  Two tables down, Kerry and her crew are laughing with glee, obviously in high spirits. The joy of triumph, Judith thinks glumly. They’re winning and they know it. She looks again at Aliza, who is shovelling in her food like a pig.

  “Are you okay?” Cindy asks quietly.

  Judith, surprised, looks at Cindy, who is frowning at her anxiously. Judith shrugs, then shakes her head.

  “Because of what Kerry said?” asks Cindy.

  She nods.

  “Don’t you pay her no never mind,” says Cindy. “That’s what my mother says — she’s from Alabama. But really, Judith. Don’t pay attention to her.”

  Judith wants to answer, but still she can’t speak. Several minutes later, without having uttered another word, she returns with the others to FRANK for their last class of the day.

  As soon as she enters the classroom, Suzy smiles at her, and immediately she feels better. The pain from Greg’s class lightens, as if Suzy, just by her presence, without even knowing what occurred, is sucking the poison out of it, like the poison out of a snakebite. Suzy begins lecturing on today’s topic: how to integrate Unconditional Positive Regard with other interviewing skills, such as confrontation and giving negative feedback. In other words, thinks Judith, how to integrate love and truth. Which brings to mind Socrates, who believed that love and truth could not be integrated. He felt one had to choose between them. At least that time when he and his friend disagreed on a philosophical point, and his friend begged him to concede out of friendship, out of love. Socrates said to him, “I love you dearly, but I love truth more.” Judith isn’t sure she would make the same choice as Socrates.

  Now Suzy points to a nondescript man of fifty-five or sixty sitting at the front of the classroom. He is a pedophile, she tells them, who has been convicted of sexually abusing fourteen children between the ages of three and eight.

  “Not someone with whom many of us feel very comfortable,” she says. “So how are you going to establish a relationship with this man? How are you going to overcome your initial reaction and find that place in yourself that is non-judgmental, so you can view him with Unconditional Positive Regard?”

  I can’t, thinks Judith. And I’m not even sure I want to. Why should I try to emotionally accept a pedophile? Or someone like Kerry? Or maybe even Greg? Fuck them all. Stubbornly she sits through the class, while at Suzy’s invitation, one student after another goes to the front and tries to connect with this pedophile. They’re all more skilled today than when they had Cordelia five weeks ago, but this guy is an even tougher nut to crack. Darra comes closest to “reaching” him, but none of them succeed. So, as in every previous class, Suzy steps forward and shows them how it’s done. Her performance today, as always, is impressive. But now Judith asks herself what the point is of all this. Does Suzy genuinely believe that everything in life — every human problem in the world — can be resolved by a little Unconditional Positive Regard — in other words, love? (All you need is love, duh duh duh duh duh …) Love is good for lots of things, but it’s no use at all for others — for instance, solving Israel’s problems. There’s too much hate there. And there’s too much hate here, too. Look what happened an hour ago.

  The bell rings. Suzy’s class is over. Judith waits in line for her turn with Suzy, to tell her what happened today in Greg’s class, and also in Weick’s. But most of all she wants to ask Suzy questions. Like what she really believes about human nature. Does she truly think a person like this pedophile can ever fundamentally change? When, in her view, can love overpower hate? And when can it not? Judith waits for fifteen minutes. But there are still five students ahead of her, and she’s tired, depressed, and hungry, and wants to go home. So she waves to Suzy, with a helpless shrug Suzy waves back, and Judith leaves.

  Outside the sunlight is very bright. Walking to her car, Judith squints and, as her eyes adjust, she laughs in astonishment. Witches, ghosts, and goblins stroll around the campus, and Ronald McDonald, with a stack of books under his arm, flip-flops across the parking lot in big floppy clown shoes. Judith now recalls something about a Hallowe’en party at the Lion’s Den, and free drinks if you come in costume. She stands and watches for a while with pleasure. Interspersed among the normally dressed students, there are Batman and Superman, rounding a corner
one after the other, Cinderella’s plump little fairy godmother all in pink, and a knight of the Round Table — or is it Don Quixote? — in clinking, clunking, shining armour. On a nearby footpath a punk rocker with nose rings and purple hair walks arm-in-arm with a human-sized frog, the two of them gaily singing together. Judith grins. Then, starting toward her car, she sees someone, or something, heading straight toward her from the far side of the parking lot. As it approaches, she sees it has no face; there’s just a dark cavernous hood from the neck up, and from the neck down, a shapeless charcoal-grey frock from which protrudes a skeleton’s hand waving a long, curved scythe. It’s the Grim Reaper. Startled, she turns and walks in the other direction. But the Grim Reaper — or is it Raper? — follows her, walking calmly, almost casually, but inexorably toward her.

  It’s just someone in a costume, she tells herself. Don’t be ridiculous. But she can’t help it — in spite of herself she’s scared. She walks more and more quickly, and then runs the final stretch to her car, hastily getting in, locking the door behind her, and with a trembling hand, turning on the ignition. This is absurd, she thinks, as she backs out, what’s the matter with you? Only when she’s about to exit the parking lot does she dare to glance anxiously into the rear-view mirror. The Grim Reaper is still there, standing perfectly still in the middle of the parking lot, watching her as she drives away. Her hands tremble. Stupid pagan holiday. What nonsense. A day when the souls of the dead supposedly rise from their graves. Then again, what nice nonsense it would be if her parents rose from their graves right now and came to pay her a visit. Even a short one. This idea captivates her, but then she brushes it away. Nonsense.

  Now she is passing through Dunhill’s downtown, and in some of the shop windows there are glimpses of black-and-orange decorations and Hallowe’en costumes. This is only her second Hallowe’en in the past ten years (they don’t celebrate it in Israel), and as a child — even though she loved dressing up in costume, and filling her bag with candy and her UNICEF box with coins — all the black and orange of this holiday used to frighten her. The black-caped witches flying on brooms with their pointy black hats, the deep blackness of the night itself when she went out trick-or-treating. The orange jack-o’-lanterns at the entrance to people’s homes grimaced at her as she stood hesitating on the sidewalk. And when she approached their front doors, her candy bag open, there would be orange flames licking at the soft insides of the pumpkins, and if she leaned down for a closer look, they suddenly leapt up at her. Flaring up. Like the bonfires on the holiday Lag B’Omer in Israel. During her first hours in the Holy Land, the night she arrived on aliya, the whole country was on fire, and she couldn’t understand why. She didn’t know it was Lag B’Omer, or that this is a holiday where the custom is to build bonfires, and the bigger the better: some were as high as sixty feet in the air. Terrified, she watched Jerusalem burn as the taxi drove her past one fire after another on the way to her new home: a dismal spartan dormitory belonging to the Ministry of Absorption. That night in Israel was orange and black, all fire and fear. And now, she thinks, also here. Hallowe’ened be Thy name.